History (39)

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• History
• Linguistics

The Kingdom and the Qur’an: Translating the Holy Book of Islam in Saudi Arabia

• Mykhaylo Yakubovych

This book presents a detailed analysis of the translation of the Qur’an in Saudi Arabia, the most important global actor in the promotion, production and dissemination of Qur’an translations. Mykhaylo Yakubovych provides a comprehensive historical overview of the debates surrounding the translatability of the Qur'an, as well as exploring the impact of the burgeoning translation and dissemination of the holy book upon Wahhabi and Salafi interpretations of Islam. Backed by meticulous research and drawing on a wealth of sources, this work illuminates an essential facet of global Islamic culture and scholarly discourse.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• History
• Literature

Synopses and Lists: Textual Practices in the Pre-Modern World

• Teresa Bernheimer
• Ronny Vollandt

Textual practices in pre-modern societies cover a great range of representations, from the literary to the pictorial. Among the most intriguing are synopses and lists. While lists provide a complete enumeration of ideas, people, events, or terms, synopses juxtapose one against the other. To understand how they were planned, produced, and consumed, is to gain insight into the practices of what one can call management of knowledge in a time before our own.

• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• History
• Performing Arts

After the Miners’ Strike: A39 and Cornish Political Theatre versus Thatcher’s Britain: Volume 1

• Paul Farmer
• Rebecca Hillman
• Mark Kilburn

In this rich memoir, the first of two volumes, Paul Farmer traces the story of A39, the Cornish political theatre group he co-founded and ran from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Farmer offers a unique insight into A39’s creation, operation, and artistic practice during a period of convulsive political and social change.

• History
• History of the Book
• Literature

Cheap Print and Street Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century

• David Atkinson
• Steve Roud

This deeply researched collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the eighteenth-century trade in street literature – ballads, chapbooks, and popular prints – in England and Scotland. Offering detailed studies of a selection of the printers, types of publication, and places of publication that constituted the cheap and popular print trade during the period, these essays delve into ballads, slip songs, story books, pictures, and more to push back against neat divisions between low and high culture, or popular and high literature.

• History
• Visual Arts

William Moorcroft, Potter: Individuality by Design

• Jonathan Mallinson

William Moorcroft (1872-1945) was one of the most celebrated potters of the early twentieth century. His career extended from the Arts and Crafts movement of the late Victorian age to the Austerity aesthetics of the Second World War. Rejecting mass production and patronised by Royalty, Moorcroft’s work was a synthesis of studio and factory, art and industry. He considered it his vocation to create an everyday art, both functional and decorative, affordable by more than a privileged few: ‘If only the people in the world would concentrate upon making all things beautiful, and if all people concentrated on developing the arts of Peace, what a world it might be,’ he wrote in a letter to his daughter in 1930.

• Biography
• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• History
• Women and Gender Studies

Breaking Conventions: Five Couples in Search of Marriage-Career Balance at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

• Patricia Auspos

This rich history illuminates the lives and partnerships of five married couples – two British, three American – whose unions defied the conventions of their time and anticipated social changes that were to come in the ensuing century. In all five marriages, both husband and wife enjoyed thriving professional lives: a shocking circumstance at a time when wealthy white married women were not supposed to have careers, and career women were not supposed to marry.

• European Studies
• History
• History: International Relations
• Textbooks and Learning Guides

The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000

• Jan Hansen
• Jochen Hung
• Jaroslav Ira
• Judit Klement
• Sylvain Lesage
• Juan Luis Simal
• Andrew Tompkins

The European Experience brings together the expertise of nearly a hundred historians from eight European universities to internationalise and diversify the study of modern European history, exploring a grand sweep of time from 1500 to 2000.

• Biography
• History
• Media Studies and Journalism

The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist, Volume 1: 1865–1887

• Andrew Hobbs

Anthony Hewitson was a typical Victorian journalist, working in one of the largest sectors of the periodical press, provincial newspapers. His diaries, written between 1862 and 1912, lift the veil of anonymity hiding the people, processes and networks involved in the creation of Victorian newspapers. Andrew Hobbs’s introduction and footnotes provide background and analysis of these valuable documents. This full scholarly edition offers a wealth of new information about reporting, freelancing, sub-editing, newspaper ownership and publishing, and illuminates aspects of Victorian periodicals and culture extending far beyond provincial newspapers.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• History

The Classical Parthenon: Recovering the Strangeness of the Ancient World

• William St Clair

Complementing Who Saved the Parthenon? this companion volume sets aside more recent narratives surrounding the Athenian Acropolis, supposedly ‘the very symbol of democracy itself’, instead asking if we can truly access an ancient past imputed with modern meaning. And, if so, how?

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• History
• History: International Relations

Who Saved the Parthenon?: A New History of the Acropolis Before, During and After the Greek Revolution

• William St Clair

In this magisterial book, William St Clair unfolds the history of the Parthenon throughout the modern era to the present day, with special emphasis on the period before, during, and after the Greek War of Independence of 1821–32.

• Asian Studies
• History

A Short History of Transport in Japan from Ancient Times to the Present

• John Andrew Black

A Short History of Transport in Japan from Ancient Times to the Present is a unique study: the first by a Western scholar to place the long-term development of Japanese infrastructure alongside an analysis of its evolving political economy.

• History
• History: International Relations
• Literature
• Literature: Comparative Literature

The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures

• Francesca Orsini
• Neelam Srivastava
• Laetitia Zecchini

This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• History

Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1000 CE

• Gavin McDowell
• Ron Naiweld
• Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra

This volume is dedicated to the cultural and religious diversity in Jewish communities from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Age and the growing influence of the rabbis within these communities during the same period.

• American and Latin American Studies
• History
• Performing Arts

Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity

• Emily Wilbourne
• Suzanne G. Cusick

In this fascinating collection of essays, an international group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural configurations of sound impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorisation of people. Addressing questions of identity, difference, sound, and subjectivity in global early modernity, these authors share the conviction that the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones, and that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds made sense could be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day scholars.

• European Studies
• European Studies: German Studies
• History
• Media Studies and Journalism
• Visual Arts

Photography in the Third Reich: Art, Physiognomy and Propaganda

• Christopher Webster

This lucid and comprehensive collection of essays by an international group of scholars constitutes a photo-historical survey of select photographers who embraced National Socialism during the Third Reich. These photographers developed and implemented physiognomic and ethnographic photography, and, through a Selbstgleichschaltung (a self-co-ordination with the regime), continued to practice as photographers throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich.

• European Studies
• European Studies: German Studies
• History
• Literature
• Other languages

Mendl Mann’s 'The Fall of Berlin'

• Maurice Wolfthal

Mendl Mann’s autobiographical novel The Fall of Berlin tells the painful yet compelling story of life as a Jewish soldier in the Red Army. Menakhem Isaacovich is a Polish Jew who, after fleeing the Nazis, finds refuge in the USSR. Translated into English from the original Yiddish by Maurice Wolfthal, the narrative follows Menakhem as he fights on the front line in Stalin’s Red Army against Hitler and the Nazis who are destroying his homeland of Poland and exterminating the Jews.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• Classics
• European Studies
• History

Sailing from Polis to Empire: Ships in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic Period

• Emmanuel Nantet

What can the architecture of ancient ships tell us about their capacity to carry cargo or to navigate certain trade routes? How do such insights inform our knowledge of the ancient economies that depended on maritime trade across the Mediterranean? These and similar questions lie behind Sailing from Polis to Empire, a fascinating insight into the practicalities of trading by boat in the ancient world. Allying modern scientific knowledge with Hellenistic sources, this interdisciplinary collection brings together experts in various fields of ship archaeology to shed new light on the role played by ships and sailing in the exchange networks of the Mediterranean.

• American and Latin American Studies
• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• History
• Information Technology and Computer Science

The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies: Perspectives on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

• William Boone Bonvillian
• Richard Van Atta
• Patrick Windham

This book is a remarkable collection of leading academic research on DARPA from a wide range of perspectives, combining to chart an important story from the Agency’s founding in the wake of Sputnik, to the current attempts to adapt it to use by other federal agencies. Informative and insightful, this guide is essential reading for political and policy leaders, as well as researchers and students interested in understanding the success of this agency and the lessons it offers to others.

• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• History
• History: International Relations
• Textbooks and Learning Guides

History of International Relations: A Non-European Perspective

• Erik Ringmar

Existing textbooks on international relations treat history in a cursory fashion and perpetuate a Euro-centric perspective. This textbook pioneers a new approach by historicizing the material traditionally taught in International Relations courses, and by explicitly focusing on non-European cases, debates and issues.

• European Studies
• European Studies: Eastern European Studies
• History
• Literature
• Other languages

The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-19: Prelude to the Holocaust

• Maurice Wolfthal

Originally written in Yiddish and here skillfully translated and introduced by Maurice Wolfthal, The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-19 brings to light a terrible and historically neglected series of persecutions that foreshadowed the Holocaust by twenty years. It is essential reading for academics and students in the fields of human rights, Jewish studies, Russian and Soviet studies, and Ukraine studies.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• History
• Media Studies and Journalism

A Fleet Street In Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900

• Andrew Hobbs

'A Fleet Street in Every Town' positions the local paper at the centre of debates on Victorian newspapers, periodicals, reading and publishing. It reorientates our view of the Victorian press away from metropolitan high culture and parliamentary politics, and towards the places where most people lived, loved and read. This is an essential book for anybody interested in nineteenth-century print culture, journalism and reading.

• History
• History: International Relations

ANZUS and the Early Cold War: Strategy and Diplomacy between Australia, New Zealand and the United States, 1945-1956

• Andrew Kelly

'ANZUS and the Early Cold War' is essential reading for historians of Australian, New Zealand and American international relations in the twentieth century. Its concise format and readable style will also appeal to general readers interested in the history and foreign policies of these nations, and to anyone who wants to know more about the individual and geopolitical tensions that beset any major alliance.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• History
• History: International Relations

Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas: Rethinking Translocality Beyond Central Asia and the Caucasus

• Manja Stephan-Emmrich
• Philipp Schröder

This collection brings together a variety of anthropological, historical and sociological case studies from Central Asia and the Caucasus to examine the concept of translocality. The chapters scrutinize the capacity of translocality to describe, in new ways, the multiple mobilities, exchange practices and globalizing processes that link places, people and institutions in Central Asia and the Caucasus with others in Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates.

• American and Latin American Studies
• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• History

The Jewish Unions in America: Pages of History and Memories

• Bernard Weinstein
• Maurice Wolfthal

From the pages of this book emerges a vivid picture of workers’ organizations at the beginning of the twentieth century and a capitalist system that bred exploitation, poverty, and inequality. Although workers’ rights have made great progress in the decades since, Weinstein’s descriptions of workers with jobs pitted against those without, and American workers against workers abroad, still carry echoes today. The Jewish Unions in America is a testament to the struggles of working people a hundred years ago. But it is also a reminder that workers must still battle to live decent lives in the free market.

• European Studies
• European Studies: Eastern European Studies
• History

Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1854

• Simon Franklin
• Katherine Bowers

From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century Russia was transformed from a moderate-sized, land-locked principality into the largest empire on earth. How did systems of information and communication shape and reflect this extraordinary change? Information and Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1850 brings together a range of contributions to shed some light on this complex question. More than a series of institutional histories, this book is concerned with the way Russia discovered itself, envisioned itself and represented itself to its people.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• History
• History: International Relations

Warlike and Peaceful Societies: The Interaction of Genes and Culture

• Agner Fog

Are humans violent or peaceful by nature? We are both. In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, Agner Fog presents a ground-breaking new argument that explains the existence of differently organised societies using evolutionary theory. It combines natural sciences and social sciences in a way that is rarely seen.

• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• History
• History: International Relations

World of Walls: The Structure, Roles and Effectiveness of Separation Barriers

• Said Saddiki

In this timely and original book, Said Saddiki scrutinises the physical and virtual walls located in four continents, including Israel, India, the southern EU border, Morocco, and the proposed border wall between Mexico and the US. Saddiki’s detailed analysis explores the tensions between the rise of globalisation, which some have argued will lead to a "borderless world” and "the end of the nation-state”, and the rapid development in recent decades of border control systems.

• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• History
• History: International Relations

Complexity, Security and Civil Society in East Asia: Foreign Policies and the Korean Peninsula

• Peter Hayes
• Kiho Yi

Complexity, Security and Civil Society in East Asia offers the latest understanding of complex global problems in the region, including nuclear weapons, urban insecurity, energy, and climate change. Detailed case studies of China, North and South Korea, and Japan demonstrate the importance of civil society and ‘civic diplomacy’ in reaching shared solutions to these problems in East Asia and beyond.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• European Studies
• European Studies: Eastern European Studies
• History
• Science
• Science: History of Science

Measuring the Master Race: Physical Anthropology in Norway 1890-1945

• Jon Røyne Kyllingstad

This book investigates the role played by Scandinavian scholars in inventing this so-called superior race, and discusses how this concept put its stamp on Norwegian physical anthropology, prehistory, national identity, and on the Norwegian eugenics movement. It also explores the decline and scientific disputation of these ideas in the 1930s as they came to be associated with the ‘genetic cleansing’ of Nazi Germany. This is the first comprehensive study on Norwegian physical anthropology, and its findings shed new light on current political and scientific debates about race across the globe.

• American and Latin American Studies
• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• History

God's Babies: Natalism and Bible Interpretation in Modern America

• John McKeown

The human population's annual total consumption is not sustainable by one planet. Many observers assume that Christianity is inevitably part of this problem because it promotes "family values" and statistically, in America and elsewhere, has a higher birthrate than nonreligious people. Challenging the assumption that religion normally promotes fecundity, the book finds surprising exceptions among early Christians (with a special focus on Saint Augustine) since they advocated spiritual fecundity in preference to biological fecundity. Finally the book uses a hermeneutic lens derived from Genesis 1, and prioritising the modern problem of biodiversity, to provide ecological interpretations of the Bible's "fruitful" verses.

• European Studies
• European Studies: Eastern European Studies
• History
• Reference Books

In the Lands of the Romanovs: An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of the Russian Empire (1613-1917)

• Anthony Cross

Over the course of more than three centuries of Romanov rule in Russia, foreign visitors and residents produced a vast corpus of literature conveying their experiences and impressions of the country. Ranging chronologically from 1613 to 1917, this is the most comprehensive bibliography of first-hand accounts of Russia ever to be published. Providing full bibliographical details and concise but informative annotation for each entry, this substantial bibliography will be an invaluable tool for anyone with an interest in contacts between Russia and the West during the centuries of Romanov rule.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• European Studies
• European Studies: Eastern European Studies
• History
• History: International Relations
• Literature

Beyond Holy Russia: The Life and Times of Stephen Graham

• Michael Hughes

This biography examines the long life of the traveller and author Stephen Graham. Graham walked across much of the Tsarist Empire in the years before 1917, and his writings about his adventures helped to shape attitudes towards Russia in Britain and the US. In later years he travelled widely in Europe and America, meeting some of the best known writers of his day. Tracing Graham’s career as a world traveller, this book explores Graham’s heterodox and convoluted spiritual quest, while also providing a rich portrait of English, Russian and American literary life in the first half of the twentieth century.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• History

On History: Introduction to World History (1831); Opening Address at the Faculty of Letters, 9 January 1834; Preface to History of France (1869)

• Jules Michelet
• Lionel Gossman
• Edward K. Kaplan
• Flora Kimmich

One of the great Romantic historians, Jules Michelet served as a model and inspiration for the founders of the influential Annales school in France. This volume, consisting of three programmatic essays by Michelet with an introduction by Lionel Gossman, offers Anglophone historians a sense of this important historian’s worldview and the values underlying all his historiographical work. Taken together, the three texts can be read as a kind of manifesto of Romantic historiography, laying out a grand vision of history, what it means, why it matters, and why it is important for historians to have a lively sense of it.

• Asian Studies
• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• History
• History: International Relations

The Passion of Max von Oppenheim: Archaeology and Intrigue in the Middle East from Wilhelm II to Hitler

• Lionel Gossman

Born into a prominent German Jewish banking family, Max von Oppenheim was a keen amateur archaeologist and ethnologist, whose excavation of Tel Halaf in Syria marked an important contribution to knowledge of the ancient Middle East. He was also an ardent German patriot, eager to support his country’s pursuit of its ‘place in the sun’. Ranging widely over many fields – from war studies to archaeology and banking history – this book tells the gripping and at times unsettling story of one part-Jewish man’s passion for his country in the face of persistent and, in his later years, genocidal anti-Semitism.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• History
• History: International Relations

A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture

• Anthony Cross

Edited by Anthony Cross, a leading authority on Anglo-Russian relations, this collection demonstrates the scope and variety of Russia’s influence on British culture. Moving from the early 1800s – when Byron sent his hero Don Juan to meet Catherine the Great, and an English critic grappled with the challenge of Pushkin – to a series of Russian-themed exhibitions at venues including Crystal Palace and Earls Court, the collection explores British encounters with Russian music, the absorption with Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and Britain’s engagement with Soviet film. Essential reading for anyone with an interest in British and Russian cultures and their complex relationship.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• Asian Studies
• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• Folklore and Ethnology
• History
• History: International Relations

Frontier Encounters: Knowledge and Practice at the Russian, Chinese and Mongolian Border

• Franck Billé
• Grégory Delaplace
• Caroline Humphrey

China, Russia and Mongolia share thousands of miles of border, but their traditions, languages and worldviews are remarkably different. Presenting varied perspectives on how the borders between these unique countries are enacted, produced and crossed, this book illuminates global uncertainties: China’s search for energy resources and the employment of its huge population, Russia’s fear of Chinese migration, and the precarious economic independence of Mongolia as its neighbours negotiate to extract its plentiful resources. Bringing together anthropologists, sociologists and economists, this timely collection of essays offers new perspectives on an area that is currently of enormous economic, strategic and geo-political relevance.

• European Studies
• European Studies: Eastern European Studies
• History
• Literature
• Women and Gender Studies

Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture

• Wendy Rosslyn
• Alessandra Tosi

Russian women of the nineteenth century are often thought of in their literary incarnations, but their real counterparts are now becoming much better understood as active contributors to Russia’s varied cultural landscape. This collection of essays examines the lives of women across Russia – from wealthy noblewomen in St Petersburg to desperately poor peasants in Siberia – discussing their interaction with the church and the law, and their rich contribution to music, art, literature and theatre. It shows how women struggled for greater autonomy and, both individually and collectively, developed a dynamic but often overlooked presence in nineteenth-century Russia’s culture and society.

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: German Studies
• History

Brownshirt Princess: A Study of the 'Nazi Conscience'

• Lionel Gossman

In the years after WWI, Princess Marie Adelheid of Lippe-Biesterfeld collaborated with Heinrich Vogeler, an artist who later joined the Communist party, and Ludwig Roselius, a successful businessman, to produce a volume of poetry entitled ‘Gott in Mir’. In this original and inspiring study, Lionel Gossman explores the revolutionary ideological context that made possible this extraordinary collaboration between three such different personalities. He also examines the subsequent life of Princess Adelheid who, until her death in 1993, continued to support the ideals of Nazism. In doing so, Gossman provides deep insights into the sources and character of the ‘Nazi Conscience’.

• Biography
• European Studies
• History
• Literature

That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence

• William St Clair

When in 1821, the Greeks rose in violent revolution against Ottoman rule, waves of sympathy spread across western Europe and the USA. Inspired by a belief that Greece had a unique claim on the sympathy of the world, more than a thousand Philhellenes set out to fight for the cause. This meticulously researched and highly readable account of their aspirations and experiences has long been the standard account of the Philhellenic movement and essential reading for students of the Greek War of Independence, Byron and European Romanticism. Its relevance to more modern conflicts is also becoming increasingly appreciated.